After many years of leaving webpages up on my monitors while I do other things, I realized that literally billions of impressions of ads are made to people who aren’t there. My Yahoo was my homepage for years – over 10, always providing me all of the news I wanted to see when I opened an IE window. It was always updated, no matter when I looked at it — and hearing the ‘click’ of a page loading was always going on in my absence from the computer.

So, blind impressions – impressions of an ad to an absent audience, away from their computer and having their ad triggered by an auto-refresh definition in the page itself – are making the CPM advertisers of the world billions. BILLIONS.

This would not include CPC ads, as no user is there to interact with the refreshing pages, keeping that part of the industry honest – but after being in the online ad industry for an extended period, noting that the largest of portals often suffer from the worst response rates, it’s no wonder – nobody’s home! Continue reading →